What the hell is going on with Fortnite?

By now, surely you have heard of the Fortnite phenomenon. Everybody seems to be playing it, including high profile celebrities like Drake and Travis Scott and hockey players like Auston Mathews. There hasn’t been a game this widely popular in pop culture possibly ever, so how did Fortnite come out of nowhere and take the world by storm?

What is Fortnite?

If you’ve been living under a rock or simply don’t care to figure out what Fortnite actually is, I’ll map it out for you. Every game starts out with 100 players jumping out of a flying party bus to land on an island with various different cities scattered around. Everybody starts out with the same thing: nothing but an axe. The axe is used to break anything from trees to walls to floors to gather up resources. Resources allow players to build forts, in order to protect themselves from the shots of other players or to climb to the top of various structures.

The premise of the game is simple: be the last person alive. Think of it like a video game version of the Hunger Games. Once landed, the frenzy begins as everybody runs to look for weapons to kill other players. Weapons range from pistols to rocket launchers, and have different value based on their colour (grey is the worst, gold is the best). Since the map is so large, there is something called ‘the storm’ that forces players into a smaller and smaller circle throughout the game. This assures that everybody will eventually be forced to fight one another, until one person is left and is crowned the winner.

Players have the ability to play games alone, or to squad up with anywhere from two to three other friends.

Why is it so popular?

For one, the game is free to play. With video games sometimes costing upwards of $100 these days, it’s a no-brainer to download Fortnite and see what all the hype is about. Beyond that, there are several reasons why people are so obsessed with the game. The unique thing about Fornite is that every single game is so different. Whether you win or lose, the progression of the game will be entirely new every time you play. Adding to that, there is honestly few things better than the feeling of winning a game. If you survive until the end, games will take around 20 minutes to finish. With that much time invested, when that “#1 Victory Royale” banner pops up when you get the final kill, oh boy. It never gets old, and it leaves you wanting more.

Otherwise, a huge aspect of the game is squadding up with friends and having a good time together. Fortnite has been bringing together people and forging new friendships for the last couple of months. The game is a lot of fun playing alone, but it’s at its maximum fun level when playing with a full squad of friends. More than that, the game is available to a massive audience at this point since it is available for free on PC, mobile, Xbox One and Playstation 4.

Will it last?

Young people now have a reputation to become absolutely obsessed with a fad, overuse it for a short period of time and then never touch it again. A little over a month ago, the biggest thing was playing HQ religiously. Now, people are barely touching it. However, unlike other things that get left in the past, Fortnite seems like it’s here to stay.

The developer of Fortnite, Epic Games, has been doing a great job of consistently updating and making the game better. Every week there are new game modes, new guns and sometimes even new places on the map. Due to this, the game runs less of a risk of becoming old and repetitive.

Fortnite is showing no signs of slowing down yet, with over 45 million total players and 3.5 million concurrent players at the moment. After recently being released on iOS, Fortnite quickly became the top-selling app in over 13 countries, including the US.

If your significant other is spending all of their time on Fortnite, your best bet at this point would probably be to join their squad and start getting wins together because Fortnite isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.